A Conductor Shares the Power, and Listeners Reap the Benefits

When watching an orchestra, have you ever been struck by the dronelike appearance of the players, even as they perform the most glorious and seemingly engaging music? Orchestral playing is often, alas, an exercise in the collective deferral of individual will, a mass transfer of artistic freedom to an all-powerful conductor, who emotes and interprets on behalf of the ensemble. Elias Canetti once famously compared conductors to fascist-style demagogues.

But when orchestras play well, they usually do so because the players, despite all of this, are somehow made to feel enfranchised. This was the goal for the Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer when he founded the Budapest Festival Orchestra in 1983. The season was kept short so that the playing could stay fresh; the model was supposed to be a chamber ensemble expanded to fill the stage.

And by most accounts it has worked. In just over two decades, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which returned to Carnegie Hall on Friday night, has built a solid international profile and a modest discography. It plays with a dark, full sound and an appealing energy that seems to flow from a combination of bottom-up and top-down leadership.

Friday's program began with a tight, effective reading of Dohnanyi's "Symphonic Minutes," the second movement standing out for its delicate woodwind arabesques voiced over hushed strings. The American pianist Richard Goode was also on hand as the soloist in Bartok's Third Piano Concerto, a work written at the very end of the composer's life and left unfinished at his death. Its limpid quasi-Baroque middle movement comes with the very un-Bartokian marking of "Adagio religioso." With a delicate yet incisive touch, Mr. Goode proposed the music as indeed a reflection on ultimate things.

After the intermission, Mr. Fischer and company turned from endings to beginnings with a deeply felt performance of Mahler's First Symphony. The few rough patches were easy to ignore as Mr. Fischer led with a wedding of expressive heat and cool, exacting control. The strains of popular music that Mahler joyfully smuggles into his score came to life as earthy and freewheeling.

That same spirit returned in the second encore as three string players moved to the front of the stage and uncorked a boisterous fiddle-led suite of Transylvanian folk music. For a moment, Mr. Fischer seemed to have disappeared altogether, but a closer look revealed him still there onstage: he was just sitting and listening among the orchestra.